Apple chalks up 40 billion app downloads

In just 1682 days, Apple's app store has set a new record by serving up its 40 billionth download since its launch. That works out to just over 23,781,212 downloads a day or 16,514 downloads a minute.

Those numbers have not always been that high, with over half of them occurring in 2012, but 40,000,000,000 is an astonishing and impressive number. With over 500 million active App Store accounts it is going to be quite hard for anyone to catch up to this many app downloads any time soon.

The Apple developer community has written more than 775,000 applications for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. Apple has had to pay out over $7 billion in payments for these contributions. By the way, for those of you wondering, that is a total of 257.24 apps downloaded every second and in the time it has taken me to write this, 132117 apps have been downloaded from the App Store.